Qiagen steps into NGS market

The company presented a sample-to-result Next-Generation Sequencing workflow designed for clinical research and diagnostics at the AGBT meeting in Florida. However, its sample preparation, newly introduced benchtop sequencer GeneReaderTM and bioinformatics solution is for research use only, as those are of its competitors Roche, Illumina and Life Technologies. However, the announcement suggested that the Dutch-German company’s NGS workflow is automated from primary sample to digital result.

"Next-generation sequencing is making a transformational impact on life science, but challenges are limiting more widespread adoption for clinical purposes," said Peer M. Schatz, CEO of QIAGEN. "The development of our complete sample-to-result workflow is a key achievement in our initiative to offer a seamless integration of new NGS platforms with high-quality reagents, molecular testing content and services."

No sequencing firm currently has a NGS workflow that is simple and reliable enough for diagnostic purposes. However, all of them aim at establishing highly automated and inter-laboratory reproducible NGS procedures that can be used by non-specialists. The adoption of NGS in fields such as clinical research and diagnostics is still hampered by workflow challenges, manual sample preparation processes, the speed, comparability and quality of data analysis.

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